The theatre world is constantly looking for an unjustly neglected playwright to "rediscover". Arthur Wing Pinero has been given an exhaustive re-airing recently and this fine production makes a strong case for Rodney Ackland (1908-1991) to be next in line for the revival treatment.

Director Matthew Dunster, increasingly a name to watch, milks every last drop of possibility out of Ackland’s sparkling 1949 script, which follows a fractious upper-middle-class family through their preparations for an exhausting round of parties. In this post-War Britain, everything is rationed except the strictures of social convention; it’s a perfectly conjured world where the right dress is paramount and awkward emotion something to be swept briskly under the sideboard. The dubious death of the husband of grown-up daughter Laura (Katherine Parkinson), recently returned from Africa, must on no account be allowed to interfere.

A high-flying cast hits all the right notes; Michelle Terry, as hatchet-faced unmarried sister Kathleen, brings the house down with her grimly crisp delivery of lines such as “You’re not in West Africa now — you’re in Luffingham”. It’s wonderful to see her and Parkinson, two of our very finest younger actresses, square up to each other. The subtly sorrowful Parkinson imbues Laura with a beguiling sense of hinterland and her more fluid emotional register suggests enlightened times to come. There’s work of startling clarity too from 13-year-old Emily Lane as youngest sister Susan, joining her siblings in despairing at flibbertigibbet mother Blanche (Stella Gonet).

If there’s a slightly awkward sense in the first half that we’re laughing at the Skinner family rather than with them, everything straightens out in the second as the social comedy edges into deeper and darker terrain. Laura, making a bolt for happiness, wishes to remarry in haste. Before then, though, everyone must dress for dinner.